Tips to make your brand a Games winner online

Friday 22 July 2011 10:03 BST

A sweeping TV shot of East London lingers on a particular shop front. An athlete enjoys a meal at a particular restaurant in the capital and tweets its name to thousands of Twitter followers. Celebrity Olympic visitors are papped in a boutique; fame beckons.

There are huge opportunities for brands to cash in on an international following during next summer's Olympic Games. But online brand analysts warn that London businesses could miss out on the chance to convert global interest into sales because their websites aren't set up to work overseas.

Multimedia marketing group Locaria flags up the example of British Airways' website. "You'd think BA would have organised its online presence in the run-up to the Games, but when we looked at its site from China, we found major shortcomings," says Hannes Ortner, director of linguistic services.

Ortner set up Locaria after running campaigns for hotel group Hilton International. He realised, he says, that traditional translation businesses lacked understanding of online media, while web firms weren't focusing on foreign needs.

"There's little point localising [translating] the content of a page on your site if things like navigation and menus still appear in English," Ortner explains. "Users get confused and abandon the site. Place names also need to be localised - Mandarin-speakers don't write the word 'London' the way we do. For example, when we check out BA's site from China, its destination search lists place names in English.

"It can't even recognise the word 'London' in Mandarin, and brings up an error message unless you type London. It's completely pointless. Why pay thousands to get part of a site localised, when the bit that brings in money doesn't work?"

That's if surfers even find their way to the site. "Firms also need to remember that not everyone uses Google," says Ortner. "Before getting to a site, most users type keywords into search engines. But with BA from China, it only showed up on Google, while most people in China, use local search engine Baidu. Likewise, in South Korea and Russia, they use Yandex and Naver respectively. BA had no ads or localised SEO [search engine optimisation] content running on those important engines, leaving visitors in the dark." A BA spokesman says that is because China is not one of its main markets. "We have five core languages on BA.com, and six other languages with some but not all functionality," he explains.

"Decisions on what language to use are based on passenger numbers and the type of market. Although China has the world's largest population, in aviation terms it's still a very restrictive market."

For London businesses wanting to secure a full online presence in foreign markets, it is crucial first to work out which countries will be most lucrative. There's little point launching a site selling British model taxis to the Taiwanese if collectable cars aren't popular there. Localisation firms offer market-testing services to clients for about £1000 per country, but savvy small and medium-sized enterprises can check out their options alone.

First, examine search volume by visiting the country's main search engine, (for example Google in Spain, France and Italy, Yahoo in Japan, Baidu in China), then translate your product or brand name into the local language. Do the same for a related generic term (Hornby might type "model trains"') and analyse the level of results. Google Insight (www.google.com/insights/search) can also help.

The next step is to set up a pay-per-click campaign on Google Adwords, says Ortner. "Pick a few keywords to advertise for one or two weeks, and see how many clicks are received. Then you can decide whether to invest more in a foreign site."

If you decide to do so, there are three options:

* DIY - the most popular route for small businesses. Use automated tools like Google Translate to turn your content into basic foreign language - but it's very unlikely to be perfect and could put a brand at risk.

* Hire bilingual help - sign up someone fluent in your target foreign language to translate your site. Note they're unlikely to be fluent in web-writing skills too, but it's a good start. Find a pool of student linguists willing to tackle the task (probably for less than you'd expect) at studentgems.com or pay for a translation company.

* Call in the professionals. An industry has sprung up to specialise in converting sites, Facebook pages, ad banners and more into foreign language-friendly marketing.